This invention relates generally to the field of nuclear medicine, and more particularly to an improved phantom device for use in checking the operation of imaging equipment.
Present trends in quality control procedures for imaging equipment, in recent years, have led further and further away from actual clinical conditions. Known in the prior art are four quadrant, parallel line equal spacing and Hine-Duley bar phantoms which present the camera with straight lines of photon distribution. The orthogonal hole phantom, while an intelligent alternative to the bar patterns, basically presents the camera with another collimator to look into. All of these phantoms present the camera with a very high contrast (lead versus no lead) imaging requirement. Although the lead bars and collimated hole phantoms offer an index of gamma camera capabilities, they fail to adquately simulate the clinical imaging problems presented by a patient. As a practical matter, patients do not present high contrast, straight line, finely collimated tracer distributions.
Although the finely collimated bar and hole pattern of prior art phantoms are useful for evaluation of parallel hole collimators, they are not suitable for use with collimators that have an extreme slant bore.